The statements in this section merely provide background information related to the present disclosure and may not constitute prior art.
Speed limiting systems have been popular in recent years on passenger cars and trucks. Sometimes the speed limiting system forms a portion of an adaptive cruise control systems (“ACCS”) of the vehicle, but it need not be an integral portion of an ACCS. Such systems enable the user to set a maximum vehicle speed, and the speed limiting system will not allow the vehicle to be driven faster than the preset maximum speed unless some “override” signal, for example a hard press on an accelerator pedal, is provided by the vehicle operator.
However, present day speed limiting systems do not allow dynamic adjustment of the maximum vehicle speed without user intervention. For example, if a user sets a present day speed limiting system to 75 mph (about 120 kph), the maximum vehicle speed when the user is travelling on a road with a speed limit of 55 mph (about 86 kph) will not be limited. Put differently, if the user is travelling along a road where the speed limit is 55 mph and inadvertently increases the vehicle speed to 67 mph, the speed limiting system would provide no speed limiting operation, because the speed limit is set to 75 mph. The speed limiting system would essentially provide no speed limiting operation until the user attempted to operate the vehicle at a speed greater than 75 mph. So in this example, the user would have to manually reset the speed limiting system to, for example, 60 mph, if she/he wanted to allow only a small (roughly 10%) increase, in the vehicle speed. The same would go for travelling in city and suburban roads where the speed limit may be 40 mph. If the user wanted to limit a maximum vehicle speed to, for example, 45 mph (roughly 10% increase), then she/he would need to reset the maximum vehicle speed for this road speed limit.
From the above, it will be appreciated that in a real world driving scenario, where the user may spend portions of a day driving in city or suburban areas, on a freeway, and on an interstate highway, this would require the user to repeatedly reset the speed limit value for the vehicle's speed limiting system.